Trump’s “Frontier” Rhetoric Accelerates the Imperial Boomerang

Trump is back, and it would seem that American expansionism is, too. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” the 47th United States president declared during his inauguration speech. Recalling the founding myth of American “pioneers” who “pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness,” the US, we’re told, now stands at the cusp of “the next great adventure.”

After the brief international press furor sparked by Donald Trump’s renewed interest in acquiring Greenland, during Monday’s speech the American president laid out other, as-yet less publicized plans: the United States will be “taking back” the Panama Canal (from both Panama and, he alleges, China), renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” and changing the Indigenous Athabaskan name of North America’s highest mountain, Denali, back to its 19th-century name, “McKinley,” in honor of the tariff-touting 25th president.

Speaking to a crowd of 600 invited and mostly supportive attendees (excepting a chastened Democratic leadership and a sour-faced Bernie Sanders striking another meme-able pose), Trump’s reminiscence on the foundation of the United States matched the setting: amidst the pageantry of his political triumph, and delivering a soliloquy evoking what my colleague Ico Maly describes as "divine power," he stood surrounded by paintings of the so-called Founding Fathers achieving victory in the Revolutionary War. 

Expansionism has defined the US since its revolutionary birth as a nation-state out of thirteen British colonies in 1776, after which it ballooned westwards. It began by swallowing the so-called “untamed wilderness,” which was in fact the populous ancestral territories of North America’s many Indigenous peoples, confining them through warfare and disease to comparatively barren and often unfamiliar reservations as the most fertile and geographically propitious land was handed to Euro-American settlers.

This was only the beginning. Following the Mexican-American War and conquest of the southwest in 1848, the US purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867. An American-engineered coup overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1883, paving the way for the annexation of Hawaiʻi in 1898. That same year, Puerto Rico was ceded to the US following the Spanish-American war, and a colony was established in the Philippines.

This 19th-century expansionism was celebrated as an outcome of “manifest destiny,” or the nationalist belief that the US was not only justified in its (often violent) territorial acquisitions but fulfilling a fate predetermined by an approving God. Manifest destiny is perhaps best allegorized in American Progress (1872), the iconic painting I first encountered in my high school history textbook and pictured above here, in which the US represented as a white-robed and white-skinned Columbia leads settlers across the plains bathed in her light – while, shrouded in darkness, Indigenous Americans and herds of bison flee the onslaught in the left side of the frame.

American expansionism has never ended

Although this vision of righteous colonialism fell out of favor in the twentieth century, the US continued to expand by other means. Beginning in the latter 19th century but consolidating especially following WWII, resources extracted from a vast territory and an expanding base of taxpayers were poured into the US military, which by 2024 received a stunning $840 billion – a greater expenditure than China, Russia, India, and six more countries combined, or in sum about 40 percent of all global military spending. Today, the US exerts power not with colonies but with some 750 US military bases in 80 countries, securing protectionist influence over its allies and deterring its adversaries. Next to spending on its own military, the US also generously funds numerous global proxies to enforce its agenda. Nowhere is this more evident than in the most profound legacy of the Biden administration, which since October 2023 delivered $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel as it enacted what Amnesty International names a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

American expansionism, in other words, has never ended. As with the story of colonialism around the globe, it simply changed form into an empire cemented by military might and the US dollar. Yet here we are in 2025, and Trump is bringing us back to the “frontier”. Is it only to drum up nationalist sentiment for a few, and draw the ire of everyone else?

While that may be true, this return to the frontier heralds a more profound orientation through which this newest Trump administration may be planning to govern – one which might be understood by examining the notion of the “frontier” itself. While in American vernacular the frontier refers to the period in which the west was colonized through the genocide of Indigenous peoples and other-than-humans, it is hardly confined to the context of US expansionism.

A frontier is a space that contains resources that are seen as free for the taking, although the process of taking is an endeavor unto itself. The very word “frontier” conjures adventure and even romance, hearkening back to the rugged cowboys of 19th-century American plains, yet equally recalling the lucrative dangers of miners operating illegally in the 21st-century Amazon, or, as I’ve written, of travelers venturing into supposedly “unknown” and “mysterious” tracts of the Andaman Sea (Smith 2023). The rhetorical power of “frontier” is part of what makes the pursuit of resources possible, as – contrary to how frontiers are imagined – these spaces are just about always inhabited. As the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005, p. 68) writes, this rhetoric “continually erase[s] old residents’ rights to create its wild and empty spaces where discovering resources, not stealing them, is possible.”

Yet frontiers are not always lands ostensibly distant from the metropole. As the geographer Neil Smith showed in The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city (1996), frontiers can be made in the identification of resources held by vulnerable people who can be dispossessed. In his study, minoritized and typically poor residents of American cities living in neighborhoods proximal to city centers were forced out, to be replaced by an upper-middle-class and largely white demographic who could pay far higher rent prices. As Smith presciently observed, today’s frontierspeople are not rugged individuals on horseback, but the owners and arbiters of capital: real estate speculators, investment tycoons, infrastructure barons.

Smith’s study of the dispossession of America’s marginalized by America’s wealthiest is a telling example of what is conceptualized as the “imperial boomerang” – that is, of a process where the tactics deployed against the colonized in the pursuit of capital accumulation are, eventually, turned against the home population of the colonizer. 

In the English translation of Discourse on Colonialism (1972; French original 1955), Aimé Césaire describes the barbarities of colonization as a “boomerang effect” in which the policies used against colonized non-Europeans were finally visited upon Europeans themselves. Writing soon after in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt observes the “feared boomerang effect of imperialism upon the homeland” (1973, p. 155), noting how the tools of domination used against colonized or enemy nations can easily be turned against the home population to effect authoritarian governance.

Poster boy of the billionaire class and head of the newly-created US Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s soaring wealth seemed to whet both his political ambitions and his appetite for far-right politics.

The imperial boomerang is no stranger to US citizens. As Connor Woodman describes in a series of articles for Verso (2020), tactics developed by the US military in such distant theatres as the Philippines and, later, Afghanistan and Iraq have informed repressive policies at home. These include measures for containing protesters, surveilling citizens, and targeting figures opposed to the US government, and are easily witnessed in the increasing militarization of domestic police forces.

But the imperial boomerang at stake in Trump’s administration is signaled by more than his promised crackdown on undocumented migrants or targeting of transgender and nonbinary people, and was evident in the inaugural ceremony itself: specifically, in three men standing behind Trump as he delivered his “frontier” vision. The presence of tech billionaires Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos – now the three richest men in the world – marks a stunning if unsurprising development in American political governance.

The accumulation of wealth by the uppermost classes in the United States has reached staggering proportions. A report released by the Congressional Budget Office last year found that 60 percent of wealth is concentrated in 10 percent of families, while 50 percent of all families hold just six percent of the richest nation’s riches. While the steady impoverishment of the middle and working classes began with Reagan’s neoliberal policies in the 1980s, perhaps nowhere is the upward transfer of wealth more evident than in its extraordinary accumulation in the billionaire class. In the years following the outbreak of COVID-19, billionaires saw their ranks expand and their wealth jump by 88 percent.

The pandemic was a bonanza for Elon Musk especially, who saw his holdings increase by seven times in the four years following March 2020. Poster boy of the billionaire class and head of the newly-created US Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s soaring wealth seemed to whet both his political ambitions and his appetite for far-right politics. His now enthusiastic fascism, evidenced by his endorsement of the German party Alternative für Deutschland and his Nazi salute during an inauguration-day rally, represents a class that – while typically more tactful – has no more respect for the vulnerable and the poor.

While liberals have jumped to decry the Trump administration’s cozying up to the billionaire class, the procession to what is being widely hailed as “oligarchy” has been in motion for a long time. 

This extraordinary accumulation has been at the expense not just of the world at large, but of middle- and working-class Americans. Deteriorating infrastructure, unaffordable food prices, and nearly 800,000 people living without a home – a number which increased 25 percent between 2022-2024 – are just a few of the many consequences of this transfer of wealth to the richest classes. With Zuckerberg circling the White House, it’s hard to not find a comparison between the country and an “enshittified” Meta app, being sold off piece-by-piece until it is left uninhabitable.

While liberals have jumped to decry the Trump administration’s cozying up to the billionaire class, the procession to what is being widely hailed as “oligarchy” (even, and apparently unironically, by Joe Biden) has been in motion for a long time. The plunder of resources that characterizes the American empire’s treatment of those it subjugates is now fully trained upon a frontier still rich in unplundered resources: the American people, who are waking up to the boomerang smacking them in the face.

It may be that Trump serves as a better alarm clock than most, so long as we remember that one of his great political talents is in using chaos as a form of distraction. And what could be more chaotic than a beaming Elon Musk on the podium a few seats away from Trump, as the 47th president waxed poetic that “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” It could not be more fitting that the conquest of this latest frontier will be via a SpaceX rocket.

References

Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace & Company.

Césaire, A. (1972). Discourse on Colonialism (trans. J. Pinkham). Monthly Review Press. Original 1955.

Smith, N. (1996). The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. Routledge.

Smith, S. P. (2023). The “untouched” frontier: an unsustainable imaginary in the anthropocene. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 31(6), 1430-1446.

Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press.